l night smothers us."

Payable Gold

Among the crowds who left the Victorian side for New South Wales about
the time Gulgong broke out was an old Ballarat digger named Peter
McKenzie. He had married and retired from the mining some years
previously and had made a home for himself and family at the village of
St. Kilda, near Melbourne; but, as was often the case with old diggers,
the gold fever never left him, and when the fields of New South Wales
began to blaze he mortgaged his little property in order to raise funds
for another campaign, leaving sufficient behind him to keep his wife and
family in comfort for a year or so.

As he often remarked, his position was now very different from what it
had been in the old days when he first arrived from Scotland, in the
height of the excitement following on the great discovery. He was a
young man then with only himself to look out for, but now that he was
getting old and had a family to provide for he had staked too much on
this venture to lose. His position did certainly look like a forlorn
hope, but he never seemed to think so.

Peter must have been very lonely and low-spirited at times. A young
or unmarried man can form new ties, and even make new sweethearts if
necessary, but Peter's heart was with his wife and little ones at home,
and they were mortgaged, as it were, to Dame Fortune. Peter had to lift
this mortgage off.

Nevertheless he was always cheerful, even at the worst of times, and
his straight grey beard and scrubby brown hair encircled a smile which
appeared to be a fixture. He had to make an effort in order to look
grave, such as some men do when they want to force a smile.

It was rumoured that Peter had made a vow never to return home until
he could take sufficient wealth to make his all-important family
comfortable, or, at least, to raise the mortgage from the property, for
the sacrifice of which to his mad gold fever he never forgave himself.
But this was one of the few things which Peter kept to himself.

The fact that he had a wife and children at St. Kilda was well known to
all the diggers. They had to know it, and if they did not know the age,
complexion, history and peculiarities of every child and of the "old
woman" it was not Peter's fault.

He would cross over to our place and talk to the mother for hours about
his wife and children. And nothing pleased him better than to discover
peculiarities in us children wherein we resembled h